The Case of Social Class (Ep43)

I started this season with Ep35- The Case of Social Change from the Margins, bringing attention to the ways margins exist around race, gender, sexuality and class. However, I find that most of our conversations on the ESH podcast, when talking with someone specifically from the margins, will center race or gender in the discussion.

Now we did have one episode that centralized social class in the case and that was Ep14- The Case of the Upper Lower Class (with the informant, C. Eric Irving). In that episode, he makes a compelling argument that many people in the margins push themselves further into poverty simply by trying to not be poor. In short, people in the margins suffer an even greater amount of poverty than they have been structurally positioned because of the interpersonal and intrapersonal power dynamics that compel them to take on debt as well as getting caught up in a trap of consumerism just to prove or to project middle class ranking.

So, in bringing all of this together, I have been thinking about my effectiveness with Ep35- The Case of Social Change from the Margins. If I am being fully transparent, I was not prepared to speak as detailed about class as I would have liked in that episode. So, today, I am here to rectify that. I hope that after our talk today, social class will get more consideration– a consideration equal to that of others markers of powerlessness – as we try to explore power, social change and disrupting margins.

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Key Points Discussed:

Social class as an issue of property, power and prestige

Social class as an inconsistent/unstable condition making it easy for it to go unnoticed as an issue of the margins